Following requirements of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, most U.S. states require utility companies to adopt interconnection and net metering policies, allowing customers to become prosumers who both consume and produce electricity, generating electricity using distributed renewable energy technologies, connecting to the existing electric utility grid, and receiving compensation for excess electricity generation. This paper reviews existing interconnection and net metering policies instituted...
This study determines the nuclear pragmatic limit where the direct physical negative consequences of nuclear weapons use are counter to national interests, by assuming all unknowns are conservatively optimistic. The only effect considered is nuclear winter (" nuclear autumn " in the low weapons limits) and the resultant effects on the aggressor nation. First, the ability of low nuclear weapon limits is probed for maintaining deterrence in the worst-case scenario of attacking the most-populous...
As a growing number of companies reject intellectual property (IP) monopoly-based business models to embrace libre product development of free and open source hardware and software, there is an urgent need to refurbish the instruments of university-corporate research partnerships. These partnerships generally use a proprietary standard research agreement (PSRA), which for historical reasons contains significant IP monopoly language and restrictions for both the company and the university. Suc...
ABSTRACT This study examines the challenges of bank fraud and commercial bank performance in Nigeria 1991-2016. The core macro-economic variables used for the study are Earnings before Tax of commercial banks in Nigeria, Expected Losses from insecurity and Fraud cases, Number of Fraud Cases, Number of staff involved in fraud cases and Volume (amount) involved in fraud cases. OLS multiple regressions is employed to examine the challenges of bank fraud and commercial bank performance in Nigeria...
ABSTRACT This study examined the impact of working capital management and profitability of 10 quoted manufacturing companies in Nigeria using a cross-sectional time series data for the period 2010 – 2015. The study used secondary data generated from the published annual reports and account of the sampled companies. Data were analysed using correlation and descriptive statistics using SPSS 20. The study reviewed a positive effect of cash conversion cycle (CCC), receivable colle...
Women face barriers that significantly constrain their production and entangle them in a low productivity trap. These barriers encompass societal norms, the gender division of labour (GDOL), resource constraints (access to and use of land), no or low use of inputs (eg drought-adapted seeds), and limited access to climate services and agro-advisories. Under a changing climate, these barriers will further constrain women’s ability to adapt, and the gender gap in agriculture will continue to ...
When we think of African Americans we immediately associate them with slave history and when we think of the indenture system, we associate it with the Asian migrant workers of the nineteenth century British colonies. Neither of these assumptions have been carefully clarified in the Indian indenture scholarship. Although, indenture history of North American colonies of Britain was extensively covered by economic historians and migration studies, very little has been discussed in regard to the...
In this essay on Sociology of Hinduism, I shall first include some classicists who discussed Hindu society primarily through traditional categories of Varna, Jati (literally means birth group, and Kula (clan/ family group) and the general western notion of caste that was applied to Hindu society. Generally in most discussions, although Varna refers to a different type of classification, these terms are not clearly distinguished, and usually conflated with the term ‘caste’.
Caste as a social phenomenon has undergone many changes. The most important operative unit that has exemplified caste in its discourse is subcaste ( jati) identity. Both within India and certainly in the diaspora, there is now increasing evidence of the dissolution of subcaste ( jati) identities giving rise to various other formations of groups replacing the endogamous relationships with other arbitrary group formations. In this article, I examine some evidence from South Africa, the West Ind...
In this paper, I wish to explore the life in the mid-19th to 20th century in the Durban-based Indian Casbah and its enduring legacy. In exploring the Casbah life in Durban, I wish to pay special attention to the narratives of the people who either were associated with it and had living memories of it, or remember the many stories passed on to them by their families.1 The central question that I explore in analysing these narratives is: does Casbah in the diaspora enable the diasporic communit...
The social relations of castes and their tribal counterparts in various regions of Andhra are structured on the basis of various economic exchanges, and the status of being lower and higher is not necessarily expressed in purity and pollution terms vis-a-vis ritual, but rather on the basis of services and products that they can exchange. Privileging the ritual sphere to explain social relations of castes and tribes, as done by Dumont (1980) and many other later anthropologists (Pfaffenberger ...
Geopolitically intertwined and strategically significant refugee policy in the MENA region is frequently analyzed in light of well-documented ethnic, religious, class, and border conflicts. However, the policy is also inexorably linked to the broader geopolitics of the global refugee protection regime and discourse. This article analyzes the complex relationship between geopolitics, domestic political dynamics, and their attendant crises in the MENA region. The complex set of political shockw...
This paper explores how unaccompanied refugee children from Syria made their way to destination countries and how they become unaccompanied and the consequences of being unaccompanied. This paper is based on interviews with Syrian child refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, and aid workers of international organizations who provide support with child refugees. The long-standing conflict has caused Syrian children to suffer immensely, both physically and psychologically. Data show tha...
ABSTRACT This study investigated the impact of microfinance banks on financial inclusion in Nigeria using five selected microfinance banks in Abuja as a case study. The purpose of the study is to examine the impact of micro financing on financial inclusion in Nigeria and to see how other factors surrounding the microfinance banks affects financial inclusion. A likert type questionnaire was used for data collection. A total of 100 respondents were randomly selected as sample for the study to...
cultural feminism talks about the type of feminism affecting women in regards to women empowerment. Cultural feminism developed from radical feminism. It is an ideology that attempts to revalidate what cultural feminists consider undervalued female attributes. It is also a theory that commends the differences of women from men (Alcoff, 2006). Brooke Williams is credited with introducing the term cultural feminism in 1975 in order to describe the depoliticization of radical feminism (Taylor an...